Impossible Histories: The Soviet Republic of Alaska, the United States of Hudsonia, President Charlemagne, and Other Pivotal Moments of History That Never Happened by Hal Johnson

Impossible Histories: The Soviet Republic of Alaska, the United States of Hudsonia, President Charlemagne, and Other Pivotal Moments of History That Never Happened by Hal Johnson is a book of alternate history scenarios that tries to stand out among all the other books of alternate history scenarios by being both crazier and less crazy than the others.

When I say it’s less crazy, I mean that Johnson stops to give arguments why he posits the things he says would happen would happen. No good alternate history makes only arbitrary statements, but Johnson really tries to persuade you. I guess I don’t know if Japan really would have been worse off with no atom bombs dropped, or if Rome really would have not fallen if they had stopped taking hot baths, but Johnson marshals a bunch of evidence that any doubting Thomas would have to argue against.

And it’s crazier, too, because sometimes it doesn’t just stop at the persuasive part, but then veers off down a highway to loonyville. Don’t get me wrong, this is a fun highway. The Roman Emperor Julian replacing Christianity with something different is plausible, but after that somehow the Turks are conquering Europe, and the New World is filled with pagan Europeans reinventing feudalism, while Ignatius of Loyola starts a secret guild of holy astronomers.

Everything is laid out in the table of contents as linear arguments so you can watch the history go off the rails. The chapter “What if the British navy kept their fruit fresh?”, for example, runs:

Scurvy is cured for real -> Polar exploration is easier -> Amphibian fossils found earlier -> YOUR FAVORITE DINO IS A SALAMANDER!

I see where you started out, there!

I think the book contains a coded admission that sometimes it’s just going off on a flight of fancy. There are constant references to weird books from the occult section of the bookstore, such as David Hatcher Childress’ von Daniken-lite Technology of the Gods or Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Mixed in with the actual evidence Johnson marshals, which comes from history books, are bald assertions taken from poetry, the Bible, or comic books. I think he’s messing with us to make the scenarios more fun!

But also I think the book is crazy because it begins with a statement that alternate histories are literally impossible, and that Napoleon is no more likely to have invaded England in 1803 than Emily Dickinson was, even though Napoleon was ruler of a hostile power and Emily Dickinson wasn’t even born yet.

In this review I’ll look at a couple of the scenarios that Johnson proposes, point out how likely (or crazy) I think they are, and close by examining the frame, represented by a philosophical prelude and a philosophical postlude.

I should probably say from the start that I really enjoyed this book. Even where I disagreed with it, it always gave me something new to think about. When I thought I knew a lot about a topic, and expected the same few facts to be cited, Johnson found strange new sources to cite. He seems to have read everything, and is never ashamed to parade this fact. For example, to show how people romanticized war during the long century of peace before World War I, Johnson uses an obscure memoir by a big-game hunter, an obscure children’s book titled Uncle Sam’s Boys in the Ranks and an obscure story by Mary Shelley. To emphasize how hated Hirohito was in America during World War II, Johnson quotes a Woody Guthrie song, a comic book, a Burma Shave sign, Colliers Magazine, and (here comes the crazy part) Emperor Hirohito of Japan: Satan’s Man of Mystery Unveiled in the Light of Prophecy.

Johnson mentions that he judges historians more on their prose style than their accuracy, and that comes as no surprise. For better or worse, he certainly leans on older writers: Gibbon, Hobbes and Hume, Washington Irving and Lord Macaulay. Johnson certainly tries to mimic them, and his prose is what they used to call pellucid. He’s never jokey but he’s often wry.

Perhaps I should say he’s never jokey except when he’s quoting actual joke books, which I think he does four or five times.

The scenarios

The book contains twenty scenarios, raging across the globe (including Antarctica) and going back as far as 432 BCE. None of them are the old standby “What if X and not Y had won the battle of…Gettysburg or Yorktown or w/e”, but several are the other old standby, “What if X died, or alternately did not die.” Some involve great events, like empires changing hands and such, and others are what you might call soft subjects, like a world without Romantic poetry or without Freud or without Harriet Beecher Stowe writing a book about Aaron Burr.

Each scenario is divided into two parts. In the first part, Johnson gives a mostly neutral, factual account of history as we know it. The second part is the what if.

The first scenario I wanted to look at is “What if Richard the Lionheart died at Jaffa?” That is to say, during the Third Crusade. Richard the Lionheart did not, in fact, die on Crusade. Instead, he sailed home to England after reconquering a lot of Crusader territory, although not Jerusalem. On his way home, a shipwreck landed him in the hands of his old enemy, the Duke of Austria. England paid what Johnson calls “a literal king’s ransom” to get Richard back. The Duke used the money to build the walls of Vienna.

If Richard had died, he never would have been shipwrecked, the Duke never would have gotten a ransom and Vienna never would have gotten those walls.

The walls of Vienna are important, because twice the Ottoman Empire found itself checked against them, once in 1529 (the book gets the date wrong) and once in 1683. Without walls, the Ottomans would have just run over Vienna, and into Austria and all of Central Europe.

There are two things to notice here. One is that Austria had three centuries to build its own damn walls. Johnson counters that in fact, Austria had three centuries to modernize its wall and didn’t. Everyone else was updating their walls to deal with new technology like canon balls, but Austria didn’t bother until after the Ottomans attacked. This is clearly a guess. What if Richard died? We can all agree that Vienna wouldn’t get walls in 1190-something. We may not all agree it would still be naked in 1529.

The other is that the scenario doesn’t end with the fall of Vienna. Soon the Ottomans are marching across Europe, destroying the Holy Roman Empire and reducing Central Europe to a perpetual battleground. When World War I starts it starts here in the ruins of the Empire. It’s pretty much the end of Europe. That’s a lot of history Vienna is guarding alone!

Johnson tries to justify this as well. The Ottomans and France were perpetual allies, and they both hated the Holy Roman Empire (and Austria). These German states would be fighting a two-front war! Also, the tiny states of the Holy Roman Empire were frequently fighting against themselves, and the Empire going through civil wars recently, between Catholic and Protestant factions. The Ottomans were past masters of playing one side against another. Protestants and Ottomans had frequently been allies. Catholics might look to France and an ally. France and the Ottomans were the firmest of allies already. It’s like a web of violence! The Holy Roman Empire was just looking to get torn apart, and maybe this is when it will happen.

Maybe! But this is the book’s method, to start out with something unassailable, build through something a little hard to prove, and then end up in a fantasy land. Some fantasy lands are more fantastic than others, but as long as all the fantasy is relegated to the what if part of the chapter, I guess it’s all in good fun.

One of the more audacious scenarios Johnson proposes involves Vikings in Vinland, namely what if the Vikings have stayed? This seems a minor point, and Johnson even calls the settlement of Vinland merely a footnote to a footnote to history. Only a pulp writer could imagine a colony of Vikings lasting through the ages on a Canadian island surrounded by native tribes.

But Johnson says they don’t have to. All they have to do is last long enough to give the natives horses, iron and germs.

Horses, iron and germs were the weapons the New World used to subjugate the old. The Vikings had all three. If Vikings brought smallpox to North America, the deadliest epidemic in history would have happened centuries earlier.

Here’s where we start to enter fantasy land (although the fantasy will continue). Because did the Vikings in Vinland even have smallpox? Probably not, although they could have brought it eventually. Would the natives of North America develop a resistance to smallpox after the first deadly wave hits? Johnson naively assumes yes, although it is my understanding that indigenous genetics would not permit such a quick assimilation to the disease. Johnson can only shrug and say, well, it can’t hurt. I guess that’s true.

Then comes the part no one can prove or disprove or even really argue with. Johnson does his best to explain why he assumes various native peoples up and down the Atlantic coast would or would not start riding horses. Finally he lights upon an Algonquian hegemony, teasing a potential Algonquia from sea to shining sea.

Whether any of that is true, it gives us something to think about. The age of imperial conquest would have been very different if Miles Standish had met mounted, armored knights!

Not every scenario has changes this vast. More than one ends in nuclear holocaust. There’s not room in this review to cover all twenty of them, so If you want to find out how a French map causes the War on Drugs in America, you’ll just have to read the book.

I already alluded to the philosophical prelude. This just asserts a very strict determinism on the authority of a couple of nineteenth-century philosophers and Mark Twain. The book conforms to the custom of positing small changes that sound plausible, such as Richard the Lionheart dying in a battle he was actually in (and his horse was killed in). If his horse had gotten killed, surely he could have. But Johnson argues that he could not have, and that making Richard die in Jaffa is no less ridiculous than making him die on Mars. Only convention prevents an alternate history “what if Richard the Lionheart died on Mars.”

This could be kind of grumpy and make you wonder why you should read the book! But it’s laid out in a funny way, with quotes from a book on ninja and a charming profiles of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. I think it’s a clue, like the occult books, to remind you that all of this is fiction. Once you enter fantasy land you can’t take any of it seriously.

The book ends with a philosophical postlude. It starts out cautioning any would-be time-travelers who want to change history that any small change will have big ripple effects, or the one big ripple effect. In any given sex act, which sperm wins the race is something that is easy to change with almost no effort. The next generation will be born of all different people!

Johnson lacks the courage of his convictions, though, and Copernicus and Marat appear in histories centuries after their great-great-great-great-grandparents’ sperm should have been modified beyond all recognition.

The most interesting part of the whole book, though, comes at the very end. Still advice for time-travelers. This time he points out that time travel looks like it hasn’t been discovered in the future, because no one from the future has come back. That means one of two things has to be true. Either traveling back in time is impossible, or humanity becomes extinct before anyone figures it out. If the first is true, trying to time travel is a waste of time. If the second is true, than even making progress towards time travel makes extinction come closer! Don’t do it!

That kind of thought experiment I find hilarious and fascinating. The book is, honestly, full of little bits like that, things that make you think in ways you haven’t before. There are plenty of facts about history I never knew about that I learned here, such as a war between medieval Ethiopia and Jewish state in Yemen, or the fact that the day Lincoln was assassinated, his secretary of state Seward was stabbed in the face.

If Seward had died that day, he never would have bought Alaska from Russia. If you want to imagine the Cold War with Russian missiles right in North America...well Johnson did that for you in one of his scenarios!

Making me think is the highest praise I can give a book, so I recommend this one.